Loveroni

The first surprise when I touch down from Seattle to the Portland International Jetport is that my mother has changed her palette.  The devout purple-wearing woman who would chide my dad for mixing her periwinkles with her lilacs when he did the laundry when I was growing up was nowhere to be seen.  Instead, a mother in a spring green shirt atop meadow green pants, “I changed colors for you!  I know you like green.”   

My dad’s surprise was that he had lost fifty pounds.  Not the fifty pounds that move my mother to take away his dessert menu whenever they eat out, the fiftyp pounds that would melt away leaving the svelte division 1 lacrosse player of yore.  No, these fifty pounds where securely in place on my father’s waist, legs, arms, and neck when I last saw him in December and took off suddenly in January, leaving my dad looking like a friendly bobble-head doll with oversized pants.   In their number was not just the stowage of the daily beer and under-exercise of a 35 year desk job, but essential muscles - calves, biceps, whatever neck muscles are called.Keeping up by phone for months on my dad’s health status did not prepare me for his shrunken appearance.   Our first hug was awkward as I slowly moved in to avoid deflating unfilled puffs of his shirt or finding the rims of his newly asserted shoulder blades.  I was unsure how to embrace a dad that did not feel like Dad.   

I had been researching my dad’s potential diagnoses since.  First came the wikipedia article on rhuematoid arthritis, then parkinsons, then colon cancer as he went through tests that eliminated each .  Always, my first click was to “Prognosis;” give me the bad news up front please, Dr. Amature Dictionary Writing community.  Then I would get into an argument with “Symptoms,” the emotion of my logic being determined by how poor of a read Prognosis had been.  Last was “People With,” the unexpected celebrity gossip column on all the disease profile pages.    In the end, the diagnosis that stuck  was a highly treatable (very good prognosis!) condition of joint inflammation.  He has been feeling better each day since the diagnosis and corresponding prescription, and for me the time is still at bay when I will weigh in above my dad on his bathroom scale. 

My nature camp growing up had the cardinal laws of the environment hanging around the dining hall.  Seeing them them for three meals a day plus indoor activities for a decade of summers means that they are some of the first phrases that pop into my mind when I am trying to get a grip on something - name it, place it, put it in the pattern so I can make an informed choice about the next step I should take.   Teammate learning about my illicit relationship from the ex-boyfriend of the one best friend I confided in while he is puking up his birthday? “Everything is connected.”  Paying $15 for an airport dinner of a Kraft Kasedilla and a salad made from the the clean up of an iceberg lettuce slasher flick? “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”  Seeing my new 3/4 size dad, the phrase that appeared on the fresh page of my Harriet-the-Spy notebook of the mind was “Everything goes somewhere.”  I looked for where my dad’s lost pounds had turned up.  

It happened that the insurgence of biomass that occurred during my my dad’s diminishing was in my parent’s small orchard.  The plum tree in the southwest corner had been going bananas, except with plums.  The tree had been around for 20 years, presenting  each season since it matured with one respectable but expectable solid basket of fruit, less a few nibbles from the resident birds.   This summer however, the tree decided to execute the great pit-fruit invasion of aught eight.  It filled all my mom’s medium size mixing bowls, demanded that my dad use a butterfly net to pick the out of reach fruit weighing down the top of the tree, and then demanded that he go out and get a new pole to extend the net by growing even more shiny, redpurple plums even higher up.  The other plum tree, rooted in the opposite corner of the orchard, was not on the same page.  When I went out to see the freak fecundity of the south tree the first day I was home, the north tree blinked three lonely fruits at me through the leaves of its shrugging branches. Inside the house, the surplums covered the kitchen and dining room tables.  Each family member who left the house to visit with the unplummed in our circles of friends felt an obligation to fill a bag to bring with.  This attrition left approximately a mountain of plums.   

By the aforementioned rule of, “Everything is connected,”  I got to tarting.When Charlie and I started hanging out and cooking meals at his place I was not surprised that he didn’t have a pastry cutter, a mixer, or a food processor.  I was interested, however, in the two spring form pans I found on hands and knees at the back of a cabinet.  How does one feel when the man one is dating possesses kitchen accoutrement that one does not themselves possess?  This was not a question I had to answer with my old live-in boyfriend of two years whose socks got shot to the moon over tuna casserole and were knocked further proportionately to the number of whole food items that could be mixed into one dish (”This casserole is great.  Can we just add the broccoli to it? And the pudding?  It all goes to the same place.”)   

It turned out that Charlie did not have a secret stack of Martha Stewart Living under the mattress (its pages stuck together with buttercream frosting).  He did have a favorite tart - his mother’s plum - that required the pans.   Plums came into the Seattle Farmers’ Markets in July and she sent us the simple and lovely recipe, kicking off weekly springformings chez Charles.  When we got bored of plums, we tried peaches baked in the utilitart batter, and meant to try blackberries but ate them all first. 

With it’s one-to-one-to-one ingredient ratios and the hundred times I had made it in the last two months, the recipe was easily on call as I faced down the plum swarm of Sidney.  I made three tarts in all, one and a half for the annual Labor Day Lake picnic and one and a half for the freezer (yes, my mom still thinks it is the Depression, even though she was too young to even reach the freezer doorhandle when the Depression actually was going on).  As I sit on the last flight out of Maine connecting through Cleveland to Seattle (one more tart-count of plums huddling in the carry-on above my head), I am happy that at a stick of butter and a cup of sugar a pop, the tarts I left in Maine may begin to lessen my dad’s need for suspenders. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.